by José de la Isla
José de la Isla
RIO GRANDE VALLEY, TEXAS– I met Marta Sánchez at her office, in a strip center next door to El Paraiso café, in Alton, just north of Mission, Texas. Marta heads La Union del Pueblo Entero (LUPE) in Alton, a non-profit organization of the United Farm Workers union.
It provides outreach services on an idea originally conceived by César Chávez for rural communities. I am here at the invitation of the Annie E. Casey Foundation looking into issues affecting families.
The office is a whirlwind of activity.
Today, Marta is dealing by phone with the aftermath of a scam by Malcolm L. Webber (aka ‘Grand Chief Thunderbird IV’) who sold “Kaweah” Indian tribal memberships to undocumented immigrants. Marta says perhaps 200 to 300 people in this county were offered $400 memberships, but I was told some may have paid as much as $1,200.
The scheme worked through evangelical church networks. The marks were allowed to believe tribal enrollment would allow them to apply for U.S. citizenship.
The LUPE office has heard from about a hundred people in Mississippi, Georgia and California taken in by the fraud.
Over coffee at the Pic N Pac, Marta tries to characterize her work in the rural colonias. These are the subdivisions her constituents have homesteaded, even though they lack many services.
We agree on “inocente,” in the Spanish sense — meaning lacking street smarts. “Viven de la palabra,” she adds. They still take people’s word for it. Her words are reminiscent of Robert D. Putnum’s observation, who wrote in Bowling Alone about how lack of trust contributes to declining membership in civic associations. Marta’s mission seems to be to re-establish it.
She hears from employees who have been short-changed or who go altogether unpaid by contractors.
Often workers simply lack an understanding about what recourse they have. Euterio, for instance, who is now an office volunteer, learned how to take his complaint to small claims court. He prevailed and now teaches others about their rights.
Euterio’s point is that an injustice gets an appropriate response.
“Those abuses are in abundance,” Marta says and explains the advocacy and education role played by LUPE. Recurring are problems that arise from contracts-to-buy colonia lots and the circumstances around which people lose their investments.
Texas had about 1,400 colonias as of 2002. Broadly speaking, they are neighborhoods and subdivisions — mostly plotted land, but not always — along the U.S.-Mexico border. The term is used mostly to mean the underdeveloped communities that represent a modern-day homesteading movement.
About 400,000 people from El Paso to Brownsville call a colonia home. Most of them are in the Rio Grande Valley, one of the poorest parts of the United States. These rural, unincorporated communities of 20 or more dwellings are physically isolated from urban areas and mostly don’t benefit much from tax-based improvements administered by towns and cities.
Colonias also face waterrelated problems, such as availability, affordability and even access to clean drinking water, drainage and sewage disposal. This multiplies the already serious, if not critical, lack of adequate health care, education, low-cost food, and other necessities. These property owners haul their own trash.
Politically, the late, legendary San Antonio congressman Henry B. González, then chairman of the Banking Committee, drew attention to colonias in 1988. He brought the Democratic presidential candidate Michael Dukakis to the border to sway public opinion and Texas’ 29 electoral votes.
During the 1990s Texas congressman Alberto G. Bustamante, as a member of the Select Committee on Hunger, drew attention to nutritional problems in colonias. As recently as November 2007, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited colonias in nearby Laredo as part of a visit to the border and the international bridge there.
This election season, let’s see if any of the presidential contenders have the courage of conviction to address issues of border security by addressing the colonias.
[José de la Isla, author of “The Rise of Hispanic Political Power” (Archer Books, 2003), writes a weekly commentary for Hispanic Link News Service. E-mail joseisla3@yahoo.com.] ©2008
